Any man who has ever been kicked in the scrotum, on a playing field or in a fight, will know the feeling. If you're hit hard enough down there it's beyond pain, as if the devil had taken a gigantic bite out of your vitals. Oh, it hurts.

Imagine what it must be like to be one of the 58 US soldiers in Afghanistan who had their balls blown apart by roadside bombs last year. This is a 90% increase over the previous year, a result of General Petraeus and Obama's counterinsurgency campaign, which sees soldiers on foot patrols in villages and farms to make friends and lose body parts.

Numbers of what the Pentagon calls "multiple limb amputations" have risen "unbelievably" according to doctors at the Landstuhl medical centre in Germany, which receives all severe battle casualties. Dr John Holcomb, a now-retired army colonel with combat medicine experience, says: "[We doctors were] taken aback by the frequency of these injuries: the double amputations, the injuries to the penis and testicles." Nearly half of the 142 soldiers with "genitourinary (GU) wounds" at Landstuhl last year suffered injury to the testicles. A recent medical journal review of more than 800 GU injuries indicates that testicular injuries are increasing.

After Obama surged 30,000 more troops into Afghanistan, stepped-up patrols went into IED bomb-infested areas wearing body armour that protects from injuries to the front – but does not protect the groin from an upward blast. The Taliban are clever at using the once-forbidden internet to spy on us, and they've also become better at knowing what really hurts, with more explosive power placed for maximum pain. They plant their IED bombs on fences or anywhere else above ground so that the blast hits the legs and genitals of passing soldiers and marines. The same thing happened early in the Iraq war, when Humvees were hurtled into battle with only scant armour plating.

Quick off the mark to beg Congress for money for hi-tech killer weapons, the military takes its own sweet time when it comes to protecting serving men and women. Maybe, at some distant point in the 80-year "Long War" which Pentagon intellectuals lovingly predict, those responsible for defence procurement may get around to Kevlar groin flaps.

Nobody in the chain of command really knows what will happen to soldiers whose balls are blown off. The medical literature is sparse, if not nonexistent. The little that is known is that lifetime testosterone supplements will be required and, according to reporter David Brown, "some might be able to have sexual intercourse" and father children. There's even a thriving business in silicone-based prosthetic testicles.

It strikes close to home. Based just south of Los Angeles at Camp Pendleton, the 3rd Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment, has had 24 killed and 175 wounded in Helmand province. More than a dozen of these marines have lost two or more limbs. Blown-away testicles is the newest "signature wound". Yet somehow it never quite makes it on to Oprah or Katie Couric's CBS news. Visually it seems less upsetting to show wounded boys and some women bravely managing their prosthetic arms and legs than to look at the increasing GU caseload.

Maybe it's because to have your sex organ damaged – literally be emasculated – might spoil the "warrior" ethos pushed by Pentagon-funded billboards and TV ads unthinkingly accepted by many of us. This syntactical shift from the old-style army of civilian soldiers to currently deified teutonic warriors, separate and aloof from the public, is puerile nationalist propaganda.

A lot of people I know find it easier to empathise with the homeless, Guantánamo prisoners, Egyptians in Tahrir Square, besieged Gazans or losers on American Idol than with our own – mainly working-class – boys and girls in uniform. Yet how can one not identify with an ordinary soldier, sometimes just out of high-school, who never knows whether his next step will castrate him? We draw a blank. Oh, that's war. Over there somewhere. Let them, the now-warrior class who used to be our children, fight and take the consequences.

This failure of identification with people supposedly protecting our "homeland" is part of the war-numbness that has castrated the American peace movement. What's so hard about looking at it straight?